1945................... 2003
.
They Held Out for Marriage; After 6 Decades of Decorum in Public, Gus and Elmer Eloped
By ANDREA ELLIOTT (THE NEW YORK TIME16-12-2003)
In the language of their generation, Gus and Elmer were friends. They worked together, took cruises together and sang in the same church choir. They lived together for nearly six decades but never held hands in public.
Then, last month, Gustavo Archilla, 88, and Elmer Lokkins, 84, crossed the Canadian border near Niagara Falls and were married.
''We eloped,'' Mr. Lokkins said in his Manhattan apartment one recent afternoon, before breaking into song. ''To Niagara in a sleeper, there's no honeymoon that's cheaper.''
Then he paused, and his tone shifted. ''We waited a long, long time.''
Mr. Archilla and Mr. Lokkins did not marry for political reasons, financial reasons or legal reasons. Through their 58 years together, they mostly stood by as others fought for rights like civil unions or domestic partnerships.
Marriage meant more to them. It was something sacred, they said, an institution they cherished even as it shunned them.
The couple capture what some in the gay rights movement say is an essential but unappreciated point in the argument for same-sex marriage: it offers something more basic and profound than survivor rights or shared health care. For many gays and lesbians, the power of marriage lies in the sanctity of its tradition, its social legitimacy -- the very thing opponents of gay marriage are mobilizing at the highest levels to protect.
For Mr. Archilla and Mr. Lokkins, the need for an official blessing was so basic that until they married, they could not make their relationship public. It was only on the evening of Nov. 12, after they wed, that they embraced in front of others for the first time.
''What we did was finally cap it all up -- make it seem complete,'' said Mr. Archilla, the son of a Puerto Rican Presbyterian minister. ''It was about fulfilling this desire people have to dignify what you have done all your life -- to qualify it by going through the ceremony so that it has the same seriousness, the same objective that anybody getting married would be entitled to.''
For years, each man attended the weddings, funerals and baptisms of his partner's family, but felt he lacked an official link.
''I wanted to marry into his family,'' Mr. Lokkins said. ''I wanted to be an Archilla also.''
The lives of Mr. Lokkins and Mr. Archilla have traced an arc in gay history: they came of age at a time when gays and lesbians could be jailed and the medical establishment deemed their sexual orientation a mental illness, treatable by electric shock.
They now live in a transformed country, where the word ''queer'' pops up on daily television listings and gay characters are a staple of Hollywood. They have seen changes they never imagined possible, from the Supreme Court's striking down of sodomy laws this year to the ruling by the highest court of Massachusetts in November to legalize same-sex marriage. Canada had legalized it several months earlier.
''It's been a period of wonderment,'' Mr. Archilla said.
Although Mr. Lokkins and Mr. Archilla have remained largely at the margins of gay activism, they have been leaders in other realms: Mr. Lokkins was the registrar of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and Mr. Archilla was his assistant. Mr. Archilla was the chairman of the board of their co-op in Morningside Gardens. As eldest siblings, they consider themselves the heads of their respective families: their annual Christmas letter has 415 recipients.
Being gay, they say, is not a significant part of their identity. They acknowledge it in a quiet way: they donate money to gay rights organizations, but they socialize mostly in heterosexual circles.
They are, in part, a product of their time -- a time when people hid their sexual orientation as a means of survival.
''It was like a secret society,'' said Terry Kaelber, executive director of SAGE, a gay rights organization for the elderly in Manhattan.
It was dusk on Sept. 16, 1945, when Mr. Lokkins first spotted Mr. Archilla walking through Columbus Circle. Mr. Archilla was on his way home from voice lessons at Carnegie Hall. Mr. Lokkins had just been honorably discharged from the Army and was visiting from Chicago.
''I had never seen anything so handsome,'' Mr. Lokkins said.
They chatted and then agreed to meet the next evening to hear a live performance of the radio show ''Town Hall Tonight.'' After the show, they walked the streets and finally retreated quietly to the hotel room where Mr. Lokkins was staying. There, he boyishly unpacked a bag filled with keepsakes from his wartime military duty.
''What appealed to me was the childlike manner of him,'' Mr. Archilla said.
Within days, Mr. Archilla took Mr. Lokkins home to meet the family. Mr. Archilla's parents had died, and he was in charge of his eight younger siblings. He introduced Mr. Lokkins as a friend.
Neither man ever considered discussing his sexual orientation with family. Mr. Lokkins was engaged at the time to a woman in Chicago; Mr. Archilla had been briefly engaged to a woman in New York.
''Living a lie was the hardest part,'' Mr. Lokkins said.
Mr. Lokkins returned to Chicago, broke off the engagement and, several months later, moved into a vacant bedroom in the Archilla family's Washington Heights apartment.
No one suspected anything at first. But soon, Mr. Archilla's siblings began to wonder.
''We noticed that he didn't date too much like all my other brothers,'' said one of Mr. Archilla's three sisters, Idalia Chimelis, 83.
The two men kept their relationship a secret. But as Mr. Archilla's siblings moved out, one by one, and Mr. Lokkins remained, the unspoken truth began to emerge. He and Mr. Archilla stayed there until 1957, when they bought a sunny top-floor apartment in a Morningside Gardens high rise.
With time, they became ''Uncle Gus and Uncle Elmer'' to members of their families. They rarely missed a family gathering. They doted lovingly on their nieces and nephews. But they never doted, publicly, on each other.
''They were never demonstrative,'' said Mr. Lokkins's sister, Helen Thrun, 81. Their discretion was essential to maintaining good relations with the family, she said.
Still, acceptance was sometimes hard won. For 40 years, Mr. Archilla and Mr. Lokkins remained estranged from one of Mr. Archilla's brothers. This year, when the man fell ill with Alzheimer's, Mr. Archilla called him and they reconciled.
Mr. Lokkins spent half of his childhood in an orphanage in Normal, Ill. He has a hard time talking about the brother who never accepted him, or about a love letter from Mr. Archilla that wound up in the hands of an aunt.
''I just wiped those things away,'' he said. ''It was terrible. I don't remember.''
Only once did Mr. Lokkins and Mr. Archilla take an active part in the gay rights struggle: in 1993, they held a banner for SAGE during a march in Washington.
''It made me appreciate the big job that other people have done for us,'' Mr. Archilla said. ''It made me feel some shame that I had not done more.'' But he and Mr. Lokkins told only a few friends about the march.
Their wedding, 10 years later, was a very different kind of act, they said.
''The emotion was different -- it was spiritual,'' Mr. Archilla said.
The idea occurred to them when they heard about Canada's legalization of same-sex marriage. In November, they had planned a trip upstate to Depew, N.Y., to visit some ailing relatives. The night before they left, Mr. Lokkins and Mr. Archilla began talking about following through with the marriage.
''I couldn't sleep,'' Mr. Lokkins said.
At 6 a.m., they called Mr. Archilla's nephew, a lawyer who lives in West Seneca, N.Y. He tracked down some phone numbers in Canada and, two days later, the couple were driving with two witnesses -- Mr. Archilla's sister-in-law, Buelah Archilla, and her brother -- across the border.
They got their marriage license at the Niagara Falls City Hall and were married in a 20-minute ceremony at the home of Dr. John R. A. Mayer, the chaplain of a Unitarian church in St. Catharine's, Ontario.
They were the oldest couple ever married by Dr. Mayer, who performed only six or eight marriages a year until the new laws were passed. Since July he has performed 50 ceremonies -- 40 for same-sex couples.
After the ceremony, Mr. Lokkins and Mr. Archilla and their two witnesses stopped at Denny's for a Grand Slam breakfast.
''They were flying high,'' said Daniel R. Archilla, 40, the lawyer who helped arrange the wedding and saw them at their evening celebration in Depew.
Some of their older relatives were still getting used to the notion of same-sex marriage but seemed ready to put the couple's happiness first.
''I'm a Christian,'' said Buelah Archilla, 75, who was the host for the party. ''It wouldn't work for me, of course. Whatever works for them is good.''
As newlyweds, Mr. Lokkins and Mr. Archilla say they feel a novel freedom.
''I feel a sense of relief,'' Mr. Archilla said. ''The maximum is getting married.''
Then, last month, Gustavo Archilla, 88, and Elmer Lokkins, 84, crossed the Canadian border near Niagara Falls and were married.
''We eloped,'' Mr. Lokkins said in his Manhattan apartment one recent afternoon, before breaking into song. ''To Niagara in a sleeper, there's no honeymoon that's cheaper.''
Then he paused, and his tone shifted. ''We waited a long, long time.''
Mr. Archilla and Mr. Lokkins did not marry for political reasons, financial reasons or legal reasons. Through their 58 years together, they mostly stood by as others fought for rights like civil unions or domestic partnerships.
Marriage meant more to them. It was something sacred, they said, an institution they cherished even as it shunned them.
The couple capture what some in the gay rights movement say is an essential but unappreciated point in the argument for same-sex marriage: it offers something more basic and profound than survivor rights or shared health care. For many gays and lesbians, the power of marriage lies in the sanctity of its tradition, its social legitimacy -- the very thing opponents of gay marriage are mobilizing at the highest levels to protect.
For Mr. Archilla and Mr. Lokkins, the need for an official blessing was so basic that until they married, they could not make their relationship public. It was only on the evening of Nov. 12, after they wed, that they embraced in front of others for the first time.
''What we did was finally cap it all up -- make it seem complete,'' said Mr. Archilla, the son of a Puerto Rican Presbyterian minister. ''It was about fulfilling this desire people have to dignify what you have done all your life -- to qualify it by going through the ceremony so that it has the same seriousness, the same objective that anybody getting married would be entitled to.''
For years, each man attended the weddings, funerals and baptisms of his partner's family, but felt he lacked an official link.
''I wanted to marry into his family,'' Mr. Lokkins said. ''I wanted to be an Archilla also.''
The lives of Mr. Lokkins and Mr. Archilla have traced an arc in gay history: they came of age at a time when gays and lesbians could be jailed and the medical establishment deemed their sexual orientation a mental illness, treatable by electric shock.
They now live in a transformed country, where the word ''queer'' pops up on daily television listings and gay characters are a staple of Hollywood. They have seen changes they never imagined possible, from the Supreme Court's striking down of sodomy laws this year to the ruling by the highest court of Massachusetts in November to legalize same-sex marriage. Canada had legalized it several months earlier.
''It's been a period of wonderment,'' Mr. Archilla said.
Although Mr. Lokkins and Mr. Archilla have remained largely at the margins of gay activism, they have been leaders in other realms: Mr. Lokkins was the registrar of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and Mr. Archilla was his assistant. Mr. Archilla was the chairman of the board of their co-op in Morningside Gardens. As eldest siblings, they consider themselves the heads of their respective families: their annual Christmas letter has 415 recipients.
Being gay, they say, is not a significant part of their identity. They acknowledge it in a quiet way: they donate money to gay rights organizations, but they socialize mostly in heterosexual circles.
They are, in part, a product of their time -- a time when people hid their sexual orientation as a means of survival.
''It was like a secret society,'' said Terry Kaelber, executive director of SAGE, a gay rights organization for the elderly in Manhattan.
It was dusk on Sept. 16, 1945, when Mr. Lokkins first spotted Mr. Archilla walking through Columbus Circle. Mr. Archilla was on his way home from voice lessons at Carnegie Hall. Mr. Lokkins had just been honorably discharged from the Army and was visiting from Chicago.
''I had never seen anything so handsome,'' Mr. Lokkins said.
They chatted and then agreed to meet the next evening to hear a live performance of the radio show ''Town Hall Tonight.'' After the show, they walked the streets and finally retreated quietly to the hotel room where Mr. Lokkins was staying. There, he boyishly unpacked a bag filled with keepsakes from his wartime military duty.
''What appealed to me was the childlike manner of him,'' Mr. Archilla said.
Within days, Mr. Archilla took Mr. Lokkins home to meet the family. Mr. Archilla's parents had died, and he was in charge of his eight younger siblings. He introduced Mr. Lokkins as a friend.
Neither man ever considered discussing his sexual orientation with family. Mr. Lokkins was engaged at the time to a woman in Chicago; Mr. Archilla had been briefly engaged to a woman in New York.
''Living a lie was the hardest part,'' Mr. Lokkins said.
Mr. Lokkins returned to Chicago, broke off the engagement and, several months later, moved into a vacant bedroom in the Archilla family's Washington Heights apartment.
No one suspected anything at first. But soon, Mr. Archilla's siblings began to wonder.
''We noticed that he didn't date too much like all my other brothers,'' said one of Mr. Archilla's three sisters, Idalia Chimelis, 83.
The two men kept their relationship a secret. But as Mr. Archilla's siblings moved out, one by one, and Mr. Lokkins remained, the unspoken truth began to emerge. He and Mr. Archilla stayed there until 1957, when they bought a sunny top-floor apartment in a Morningside Gardens high rise.
With time, they became ''Uncle Gus and Uncle Elmer'' to members of their families. They rarely missed a family gathering. They doted lovingly on their nieces and nephews. But they never doted, publicly, on each other.
''They were never demonstrative,'' said Mr. Lokkins's sister, Helen Thrun, 81. Their discretion was essential to maintaining good relations with the family, she said.
Still, acceptance was sometimes hard won. For 40 years, Mr. Archilla and Mr. Lokkins remained estranged from one of Mr. Archilla's brothers. This year, when the man fell ill with Alzheimer's, Mr. Archilla called him and they reconciled.
Mr. Lokkins spent half of his childhood in an orphanage in Normal, Ill. He has a hard time talking about the brother who never accepted him, or about a love letter from Mr. Archilla that wound up in the hands of an aunt.
''I just wiped those things away,'' he said. ''It was terrible. I don't remember.''
Only once did Mr. Lokkins and Mr. Archilla take an active part in the gay rights struggle: in 1993, they held a banner for SAGE during a march in Washington.
''It made me appreciate the big job that other people have done for us,'' Mr. Archilla said. ''It made me feel some shame that I had not done more.'' But he and Mr. Lokkins told only a few friends about the march.
Their wedding, 10 years later, was a very different kind of act, they said.
''The emotion was different -- it was spiritual,'' Mr. Archilla said.
The idea occurred to them when they heard about Canada's legalization of same-sex marriage. In November, they had planned a trip upstate to Depew, N.Y., to visit some ailing relatives. The night before they left, Mr. Lokkins and Mr. Archilla began talking about following through with the marriage.
''I couldn't sleep,'' Mr. Lokkins said.
At 6 a.m., they called Mr. Archilla's nephew, a lawyer who lives in West Seneca, N.Y. He tracked down some phone numbers in Canada and, two days later, the couple were driving with two witnesses -- Mr. Archilla's sister-in-law, Buelah Archilla, and her brother -- across the border.
They got their marriage license at the Niagara Falls City Hall and were married in a 20-minute ceremony at the home of Dr. John R. A. Mayer, the chaplain of a Unitarian church in St. Catharine's, Ontario.
They were the oldest couple ever married by Dr. Mayer, who performed only six or eight marriages a year until the new laws were passed. Since July he has performed 50 ceremonies -- 40 for same-sex couples.
After the ceremony, Mr. Lokkins and Mr. Archilla and their two witnesses stopped at Denny's for a Grand Slam breakfast.
''They were flying high,'' said Daniel R. Archilla, 40, the lawyer who helped arrange the wedding and saw them at their evening celebration in Depew.
Some of their older relatives were still getting used to the notion of same-sex marriage but seemed ready to put the couple's happiness first.
''I'm a Christian,'' said Buelah Archilla, 75, who was the host for the party. ''It wouldn't work for me, of course. Whatever works for them is good.''
As newlyweds, Mr. Lokkins and Mr. Archilla say they feel a novel freedom.
''I feel a sense of relief,'' Mr. Archilla said. ''The maximum is getting married.''
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου